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Inside India’s ‘Museum of Conflict’ That Just Won a Major International Award

Barkha Kumari, Vice, December 4, 2020

In 2013, Avni Sethi did a small research in her hometown. It was to know whether the Indian city of Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat would like to have a museum to discuss conflicts. Many residents she spoke with said that the 2002 communal riots, which killed at least a thousand people in Gujarat, were an aberration. They insisted that Ahmedabad otherwise is a largely peaceful city, implying that this museum was irrelevant. These responses, however, fired her up even more to open Conflictorium — Museum of Conflict that year, unaware that what started off as a college project would win international acclaim one day.

Two months ago, Sethi bagged the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice for 2020-22, which is given by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School to artists on their project’s long-term impact and boldness, and under which, she has been given a cash reward of $25,000 and an opportunity to host an exhibition in New York next year.

Conflictorium is not your average museum where you go, browse through historical facts and artefacts, and forget about them soon after. Set in the 95-year-old Gool Lodge (a mansion that once belonged to Ahmedabad’s first trained hairstylist, Bachuben Nagarwala), the museum has been designed as a site to introspect on conflicts because acceptance is the first step towards resolution, or human refinement, as its website says.